Based on my limited experience in the expansion beta, I concluded that I was not going to need all of the existing content I had yet to complete to supplement the solo content of Odus en route to 90. As a result, I decided to finish off Jarsath at level 80 for the alternate advancement experience. The beta pre-made characters started off at 150 AA, and I was able to reach 140 through my various meanderings, so it was probably a good thing that I took the time to catch up a bit.

The main solo goal of the zone is to complete lengthy quest chains for three separate factions. Capping out that many reputation bars sounds intimidating, but all of the reputations hit their maximum just from completing all of the solo quests. The reward is a hammer that teleports you to the zone when you use it as a weapon. Why is this teleport in the form of a hammer in general, and/or an equippable weapon in particular? Perhaps some developer finds it amusing if someone forgets to unequip the thing and accidentally uses it to teleport out of a dungeon, I dunno.

I also visited an older dungeon called Unrest - apparently a remake of an EQ1 zone - with some guildies. The place was well crafted and pretty rewarding (I got an entire AA's worth of experience from the named kills), but it also had a moderately high amount of trash and a bunch of puzzles that I can't imagine would still be novel if you were running the place repeatedly. Given that class set helms and chest pieces drop off of the bosses, I'm guessing that running it repeatedly is exactly what players did back when the level cap was 70. Ah well, to each their own, I suppose.

When I wasn't killing stuff for AA, I took a bit of time to reorganize my UI and hotbars. I'm going to get a few new abilities, and I really needed to move and re-size some hotbars in order to make that work without eating up my entire screen. (I currently have a total of 17 buffs on my buff-happy Dirge, and I'm going to get a few more in the expansion and/or as I gain AA's.) It's amazing how many settings there are that I would have loved to have known about, but didn't set when I started playing because I was too new to know what they were for.

My last real goal for the pre-expansion rush is to learn the language of the dragons (which is needed for the new Mythical buff quest) and generally clear out space in my quest log for new and exciting areas I have yet to visit. As part of this quest, I had to go into the evil-aligned city of Freeport anyway, so I decided to complete the evil side of the expansion launch world event. What would a good-aligned Fae like Lyriana want with the title "Champion of (the Evil Overlord) D'Lere"? Given that I do technically play on an RP server, this seemed like a bit of a stretch. But what if Lyriana had an undercover disguise as an evil Dark Elf?

It's the little places like this where EQ2 gets me to actually think about my character and the storyline that really stick out in my memory in the long run.

2 comments:

There was a hammer from the Scars of Velious expansion which teleported you to Overthere, if my memory serves me correctly. I can only imagine that that is what the developer had in mind when creating this item. This was before PoK existed, so even though Overthere was only a marginally useful location, it was better than nothing for melee classes...

Unrest was indeed run repeatedly when 70 was the cap in order to get the set pieces. It was much nicer once the smart loot system was put on it so you didn't have to run it so often also.

The puzzles were decent-ish the 1st time or 2, but after that they were just content gates and pretty annoying, I'll certainly give you that. Even so.... I've been in groups that knew the zone well enough to finish it in less than an hour, so take that for what you will.

Would you believe I haven't finished the JW quest lines on any of my characters? I've worked on them here and there, but still no hammer for me. . . .

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About Player Versus Developer

I'm what they call a "WoW Tourist" - WoW was my first MMO, and being able to set my own schedule is a dealbreaker. At any given time, I can be found ducking in and out of half a dozen different MMO's.

This blog details some of my own personal exploits, but it also focuses on a meta-gaming issue that I find very interesting - the decisions developers make on how to reward player activity, and the decisions players make in response to maximize their own rewards.